Wine alcohol levels certainly are climbing. Elin McCoy reported in her Bloomberg column, “High-Octane Wine Fashion Craze Provokes Dumping, Rebellion,” that her survey of California wine labels indicates a rise from 12.5 percent in 1971 to a 14.8 percent average in 2001. Mind you, back then, common practice was to print multiple vintages of labels (with the vintage on a neck label) and to show the alcohol as 12.5 percent, taking advantage of the 1.5 percent federal leeway below 14 percent. But Australian Wine Research Institute figures show the same trend for their wines based on actual analysis: from 12.8 in 1975 to 14.5 percent today.

New Tariff in Town

Drinking stronger doesn’t mean drinking more. According to the World Health Organization, Americans decreased their overall per capita alcohol consumption by over 20 percent from 1980 to 2000. We’re drinking less and enjoying it more, but maybe compensating a bit by shifting buying preferences to stronger stuff. Without a doubt, there was a shift in the ‘80’s from light wines – mostly white and rosé and usually a little sweet - to bigger, drier styles like Chardonnay and the big reds as wineries lured hard liquor drinkers away from spirits. And when the federal tax on a gallon of wine soared in 1984 from 17¢ to $1.07, gallon jug prices tripled overnight from $2 to $6 and former jug drinkers shifted to 750 ml, while wine consumption plunged from 12 liters per capita to 8 liters the following year.

I should point out that, in terms of ripeness, the trend is much more drastic than the numbers indicate because of the new alcohol adjustment technologies which Conetech and my own company Vinovation have popularized in the last decade. Together we take an average of over 1 percent alcohol from 45 percent of the California wines you buy. So in terms of actual alcohol at the end of fermentation, the average in 2001 was well over 15 percent.

Where is this alcohol coming from? Countless articles have recently emerged on this topic, each with its own novel slant. Let’s look over some reasons offered up in the popular press for this trend, and then I’ll take us behind the scenes into the minds of today’s winemakers.

Are we seeing another artifact of climate change, somehow raising the sugar in our fruit? In its December 2006 issue article about the rise of the emerging Tulucay appellation Cabernet, Wine and Spirits Magazine implicates global warming in the rise of Howell Mountain alcohols and the rush to the cool end of Napa. At $100, my own WineSmith Crucible Cabernet Sauvignon certainly benefits from dialing in its source vineyards in the region to maximize tannin density and deep ripe flavors. But with due respect to Al Gore’s consciousness promoting efforts, Napa town is still quite chilly. Experimental plantings at Napa Valley College reveal that the secret to the region is clonal. Clone 337 Cabernet comes in there at 25 Brix with huge dimensions and great color, three weeks before up-valley champion Clone 7, planted right beside it, reports in as a wimpy, weedy Beaujolais at 21.5 Brix. In fact, the rising heat of the Central Valley is pulling in more ocean air, rendering the South Valley cooler, not warmer.

Are the new super yeasts to blame? Yes and no. Yeast strains can’t change the conversion ratio of sugar to alcohol, at least not very much. The six carbon atoms in a sugar molecule have to go somewhere. Two atoms end up as carbon dioxide. The other four go to ethyl alcohol plus miniscule amounts of other flavors like glycerol and to the growth of the yeasts themselves. To change alcohol by 1 percent would mean 17 grams per liter of sugar came from somewhere else – an enormous amount. And super yeasts make more cell mass, not less, thus lowering alcohol.

However, these ultra-vigorous yeasts do permit us to ferment grapes to dryness which in the old days would have stuck sweet. So they do indeed open up the door for harvesting grapes with very high sugar content. But why would we wish to do that?

Some say today’s vines are grown so artificially that they fail to achieve the natural balance required to get ripe flavors at normal alcohols, and that our wines won’t reflect balance until we embrace organics. In his article entitled The Science of Sustainable Viticulture, John Williams of Frog’s Leap indicts excessive inorganic fertilizer and over irrigation in a host of wine quality issues and reports that balancing soil fertility and abandoning sterol inhibitors and dimethoate now gives him flavors at 23.5 Brix he didn’t used to see until 28 Brix.

I have no doubt that John is exactly right. But these practices were even more rampant in the ‘70’s than they are today. And they don’t account for the catastrophes which befell long-established Barolo producers in 1997, who deliberately chose to let the fruit on their beautifully balanced vineyards hang until the resulting wines lasted less than a decade. I’m afraid that, at its root, ripeness craziness is more a mental disease than a reaction to some physical disorder. Like alcohol dependency itself, a good thing pushed too far.

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us

So what caused the shift in California’s alcohols? An obvious first answer is that the kind of wine the New World has come to specialize in isn’t the Rhinewine, Chablis and rosé that California wineries were dishing up in the 1970’s, when the principal wine grape was Thompson Seedless. The largest selling table wines in the U.S. during that period are shown in the chart on the right: All low alcohol European or Euro-style quaffables.

Over the next thirty years, the wine Americans drank shifted toward California while simultaneously the State’s production has been boosting the wallop it packs. But to chalk up the change in table wine alcohol content to shifts in stylistic preference is almost a circular argument. Wines got bigger because they got bigger?

High alcohols from New World producers aren’t a new thing. In fact, if you go back to 1951, you’d find the average in both California and Australia would be over 18 percent! That’s because at that time, wine consumers, when they drank domestic wine at all, drank almost entirely port, sherry and muscatel. A miniscule group at the upper end who drank French and a few German table wines didn’t believe domestic stuff was worth considering. So California wine at that time was over 90 percent fortified, and Chardonnay was almost unplanted. Our few wine lovers went through maybe a bottle a year of port and sherry, and the rest was light European wines. So what brought about the shift to more potent table wines as standard California fare?

Let’s examine the story of that wonderful period during which the fledgling California Serious Wine Industry created itself. Winemaking style evolution during this period was a dynamic interplay between inventive producers and attentive consumers. In a dizzying economic dance, emerging consumers were shifting their preferences in reaction to quality increases and exciting new styles invented by winemakers; wineries were twisting and turning in reaction to the ebb and flow of new streams of cash; and growers were budding over and budding back. Critics just tried to keep score of a game with no rules.

What the wineries decided to dish up had a big impact on consumer trends. Nowadays, big smart marketing agencies get paid megabucks to eliminate this trial and error process, but most new ideas still come from the wine’s small business end. If we’re going to understand what’s really behind the trend to punch up alcohols, the winemakers’ experimental process over the last three decades deserves a look.

Taking on the Champ

The seeds of New World dominance in Big Wines were sewn in the late ‘60’s when a handful of pioneers, encouraged by the consistent success of BV, Inglenook, Louis Martini and Charles Krug, began to plant Cabernet Sauvignon all over Napa Valley and a tiny bit of Chardonnay here and there. By the early ‘70’s, there were dozens of wineries producing serious wines. American drinking habits were moving away from hard spirits, and baby boomer consumers were getting opulent and moving towards gracious lifestyles in which the affordable luxury of wine collecting made sense. But California needed a stroke of luck to get their attention. It happened in Paris in 1976 at the famous Academie du Vin tasting when Warren Winiarski’s Cabernet and Mike Grgich’s Chardonnay shocked the world by swiping top honors from the established elite in Bordeaux and Burgundy.

How did California winemakers react to their unexpected triumph in Paris in 1976? What was the creative psychology of that moment? How did they account for it, and what was their edge which they needed to keep on exploiting? I believe it boils down to two things. NO rain. And NO rules.

France is cold, and it rains in the fall. Napa is considered a paradise for the vine because it’s dry. Besides presenting a hostile climate to many pests and diseases, Napa’s climate assures reliable ripening in nine years out of ten. That’s not the case in France, where good years are the minority and a great vintage is hoped for once a decade. So dialing in perfection in a new vineyard can happen much faster.

Our second advantage is the attitude of regulators. In France, the grapes you plant, the procedures you use and even the day you must pick your grapes are prescribed by law. The US system doesn’t prescribe, it proscribes. Certain practices are illegal, and anything else is up for grabs. The European system is designed to protect tradition, while the American system encourages experimentation. Knowing that they’ll be judged in the marketplace against the European standards obliges California winemakers to conform to classic high ticket style niches anyway.

But with a loose regulatory environment and nothing to lose, Californians were at liberty to discover optimum vine / site matches. Their timing was good, and when technological innovations exploded onto the scene, Californians were much quicker than their Old World competitors to incorporate new ideas and methods toward rapidly improving their wines - better trellis systems, harvesters, presses, pumps, specialized yeasts and malolactic bacteria strains, extraction techniques and ageing methods.

It didn’t take them long to figure out where their edge lay. The Big Wine. The French left a wide open door by establishing Chardonnay at the top of the varietal nobility pecking order, and within that category (if price is any guide) anointing Le Montrachet as the best of the best, a wine distinguished by its enormous dimensions. To Chardonnay lovers of the ‘70’s, bigger was better. Since the AOC’s where Chardonnay is grown are mostly incapable of producing The Big Wine, the situation constituted an open invitation for hundreds of wineries in warm, dry California to make big wine. In 1975, lean Chardonnays from Spring Mountain and Freemark Abbey were superstars, and the big Ridge and Martin Ray offerings were rare exceptions. A decade later, Stony Hill and El Molino were considered fringe screwballs for clinging to a lean non-malolactic style.

By 1980, cheap Chablis was Out and the noble quaff Chardonnay was the In by-the-glass pour throughout the nation. By getting Glen Ellen Private Reserve on the Safeway shelf at two-for-$7, Delta Force-style ace wine marketer Bruno Benziger surfed that trend in three short years from garage scale to the largest Chardonnay producer in the world. With an average alcohol of over 13.5 percent, we had already bumped the octane in a glass of white wine by a point or better.

Silicone Injections Become the Rage

With each successive vintage, size became more and more important. By the end of the ‘80’s, the genius of Jed Steele had established Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve as the State’s benchmark Chardonnay through brilliant vineyard selection, consummate blending skill, and shamelessly pumping up the wines with oak, malolactic butteriness and residual sugar. His stormy divorce with his employer left his replacement, John Hawley, with big shoes to fill. The secret weapon John presented to Jess Jackson to add still more richness was – you guessed it – extended hang time.

Richness through hang time was an appealing formula for a corporate don trying to build an industrial machine without coddling to some temperamental artistic genius. It had the added advantage that the extra richness came out of the grower’s pocket. Above 24 Brix, grapes cannot transport sugar into the berry. In areas lacking autumnal rainfall, Brix climbs anyway as water evaporates – reverse osmosis on the vine. Since grapes are sold by the ton, that shrinkage came out of the grower’s pocket. It took twenty years for Andy Beckstoffer to blow the whistle on this cute little razzle-dazzle in his famous town hall symposia, Hang time I, II, and III.

In the seventies, light whites and rosés led the market and little red wine was consumed. That all changed on November 17, 1991 when CBS televised “The French Paradox” which projected a strong likelihood that red wine prevented heart disease. Hey, worth a try! Red wine sales increased 39 percent overnight. The swing to reds was cemented in 1995 when 60 Minutes aired a Copenhagen study which estimated optimum healthy consumption at 3-5 glasses per day. But the problem was, trend-following novices couldn’t stomach the wines that won at Paris.

Cabernet of normal ripeness is a bit on the chewy side for even the most heath-motivated wine initiate. Do you have something a little softer? Every retailer’s answer – Merlot. Ah, that’s better. But does it have to smell so funny?

The Roots of ”Pyra-noia

By this time, the North Coast was running out of affordable land, and growers looked south to Monterey and eventually the Central Coast for the new vineyard sites for premium wines. The Monterey Valley, salad bowl of the Western U.S., was utterly unlike anything California viticulturalists had seen before - a cold, sunny, windy desert. To this, they brought their new scientific marvel: the first large-scale planting of disease-free, own-rooted vines.

This new scientifically purified master race of Cabernet and Merlot vines was incredibly vigorous, and the resulting fruit shading played perverse genetic flavor tricks, compelling grapes to express strong bell pepper flavors called pyrazines, which in the wild repels birds from fruit with immature seeds. The disaster which ensued left a pyrazine-paranoid imprint on California’s winemakers. Veg is bad. So, to this day, we refuse to compete with New Zealand’s gorgeously herbaceous Sauvignon Blancs. Like, don’t even go there.

This mentality gave rise to a rumor: hang time cures veg. Recent Davis studies indicate that hang time has no effect on pyrazines. Yet in a sense, the rumor is true, because excessive field oxidation creates pruney, raisiney aromas which mask other flavors. Unfortunately, it also obscures terroir expression and makes Cabernet, Zinfandel, Syrah, what-have-you, taste pretty much alike.

Emulating Bordeaux in sunnier climes has always involved distilling the right lesson out of their experience. When we fail to connect the dots properly, it’s often highly comic.

Vignerons in Burgundy and Bordeaux determined by Napoleon’s time that their wines were best balanced at about 13 percent alcohol. Since autumnal rainfall routinely prevented their grapes from achieving the required 23 percent sugar, Napoleon’s physician, one Dr. Chaptal, proposed addition of sugar from beets to enhance the balance and stability of French wines, and the Emperor codified the procedure which remains today the standard practice for French premiers crus in weak years. In France, you don’t pick on Brix, you pick on flavor and color.

In California, chaptalization has long been banned. What the heck - our dry harvest weather seldom encumbers Brix. So our standard practice until the ‘90’s was to pick serious reds for the time-honored alcohol balance – 23.5 Brix. Nobody really picked on flavor, because there was no way to reduce the alcohol to standard levels. The possibilities of enhanced ripeness were largely unexplored, with the exception of a few late harvest Zinfandels, often as not stuck fermentations with residual sugar, thus hardly standard table fare.

In the early ‘90’s, Conetech and my company, Vinovation, introduced two competing technologies for dealcoholizing wine. Suddenly everybody could explore this new ripeness terrain and readjust their alcohols to normal levels. At the same time, improved yeast strains made the stuck fermentations less likely.

It worked! We soon discovered that in the warmer, drier climate of California, the rich “dark fruit” flavors, tannins and pigments that score high with critics don’t generally reach their maximum level until 25 Brix or so. Another week or two on the vine was giving us richer, truer aromatics as well as higher levels of color while also improving extractability.

But there was bad news. These massive, vigorous young wines misbehaved badly, full of tight tannins and prone to closed up or stinky aromatics which mask fruit and enhance those green, veggie smells. Our wines were bigger, richer and truer, but they tasted terrible.

French trained locals like Bernard Portêt and Christian Mouiex were quite familiar with these behaviors and knew them as marks of greatness. Reductive energy is strongest in the best wines, and the traditional cure has always been to age them. But the market which emerged as a result of the French Paradox wanted big, drinkable wines now!

The new wave of red consumers didn’t have wine cellars or the training to use them; nor did the thousands of gentrified restaurants and tony retailers which sprang up to supply them. They wanted rich, yummy reds with loads of life-giving bioflavonoids and luscious fruit. Today, please.

Unleash the Flying Monkeys

In the late ‘80’s, wineries in California, Chile and the South of France hired Australian “Flying Winemakers” to oversee their harvests at the behest of U.K. powerhouse retailers who felt Australian expertise held the keys to marketable styles which they could dependably contract in extravagant quantities with confidence. Though their reign was short-lived, the stamp of their techniques imprinted indelibly on the philosophy of emerging regions for decades to come.

Chief among these, “field oxidation” refers to the Australian practice of resolving tannin prior to harvest. Fruit left long enough on the vine loses its reductive strength and mean-spiritedness and softens into fruit-forward, user-friendly wine that “makes itself” in the fermentor. This practice is well suited to industrial winemaking, as it leaves little to do at the winery, allowing wines to be made in South Australia’s massive wine factories by minimum wage labor with a limited enological staff able to oversee thousands of tanks without the necessity of daily intervention. It is brilliant in concept, and gave rise to the “flying winemakers” who revolutionized winemaking in southern France in the late ‘80’s. It’s arguably the way to make wine in situations where a “glass ceiling” for quality appreciation is present due to connoisseur prejudice, such as in South Australia, the Languedoc, and California’s San Joaquin Valley.

My French training under Patrick Ducournau of OenoDev prejudices me away from this style because it deprives the wine of depth, energy, soulfulness and longevity in favor of early drinkability. In the coming months, I’ll go into more depth on this subject, and why California winemakers have recently begun to get smarter on romancing their tannins while protecting depth and integrity. For now, let’s just leave it at the notion that in the swing to reds in the early ‘80’s, we misapplied the white wine practices to reds, inadvertently making them harsher, more vegetal and generally less sexy. The hang time cure is a way to destroy the vigor and structure of a red so it behaves like a white wine: simple, fruity, easy drinking and pointless to age.

Where does that leave us? Today, California winemakers divide themselves into various camps. When I take on a new winery client, I ask them whether their wine is supposed to make the customer smile, blow his ears off, or make him think. They divide themselves into these strategies:

1.“Wow” wines designed for impact rather than balance. They want big tannins, forward fruit, and the alcohol that goes with it. No Wimpy Wines! Some intentionally seek dry tannins to frame fruit and enhance impact.

2. “Yummy” wines. They want the maturity but don’t accept the alcohol. They look for an harmonious balance point which drives the fruit. Some favor New World, in-your-face fruit-driven styles and will hang until they get prunes and soft tannins.

3. “Ah-hah!” wines. These are the fundamentalist true believers that look for a balance point which presents rich and distinctive flavors. Their wines are often more austere and their passion for individuality disqualifies them from competition in the mainstream commodity marketplace. Yet with them lies our hope for the future.

At first it seems reasonable to say, “What the heck? Let the lovers of minerality and terroir drink French, and continue to ignore the New World.” But the emergence of California’s niche as the source of Big Wines has a downside. Because we are not really making Le Montrachet. The greatest French wines combine both styles: incredibly broad and deep.

California’s absence of restriction allows us to explore new techniques to achieve the very best expression of our land, a process which is illegal in the AOC’s of France. But experimentation will follow market demand. If there is no appreciation of depth, longevity and balance, we won’t seek it. Alcoholic toasty butter bombs may be the destiny corporate wineries have chosen for us, but that’s certainly not the limitation of our styles, and such wine speaks absolutely nothing about our terroir. But I fear we are creating the opposite impression among consumers, and losing the best of them. If California is not to be doomed to typecasting as devolved Muscle Wine, winemakers must redouble their efforts to explore alternative styles outside the mainstream and recapture the magic which our wine carried before bulking it up actually dumbed it down.

Jordan MacKay suggested to me in a recent interview on California’s obsession with bigness that there is a parallel with the pressure to use steroids in professional baseball. Californians are impressed by those who bulk up – we even elected one Governor. But it didn’t hurt Schwarzenegger’s popularity when he turned up as an articulate spokesman for his odd but intriguing point of view. We can make big wines that have something to say. I just hope consumers won’t write California winemakers off before we get around to it.

Judge Not, Lest ye Be Judged

There’s no question that winemakers the world over have been experimenting with extended maturity in the last decade or two, and pleasing the critics has certainly played a role. Robert Parker has become the standard punching bag for his supposed bias of overblown styles, but in my view the Emperor of Wine is less unclothed than his detractors claim. Parker does indeed love big wines, but he loves other styles, too, and more to the point, seldom has dished out 90+ to wines without depth and soulfulness. The Pontet-Canet scandal wouldn’t have been news if it weren’t the exception.

There are problems surrounding Parker that really aren’t his fault. As an articulate, honest and outspoken authority, he has attracted so much loyalty that he influences spending habits at the top end more than any other critic. Second in influence is The Wine Spectator, which certainly favors size over elegance. But the real bad actors in this drama are the winery marketing departments who, in search of easy answers, try to reverse engineer high scores. Consulting firms like Enologix, Tragon and Flavorsense, eager to supply simplistic “quality drivers” for big bucks, dominate the winemaking process over traditional values like balance, depth and longevity.

For my money, there is an element far more damaging to winemaking than Parkerism. Ignorant, provincial California retailers. Know why? Because most winemakers don’t like to leave their families and check out Manhattan, Chicago, Dallas, DC, Denver and Miami. They do their market research with their buddies in the City.

In my experience (with notable exceptions), San Francisco retailers are, on the average, the dumbest on earth. I once offered my 100 percent Chardonnay I call “Faux Chablis” to a top buyer in the City and he asked me in all seriousness what it had to do with Gallo Ruby Chablis. It is commonplace to be asked to taste with these morons out of one ounce plastic cups. Provincial? Forget about Europe – a bottle of Oregon Pinot is as rare an Elvis sighting.

One thing they all look for is impact. They want size. They want whiskey in a burgundy bottle. Their education and experience are the lowest in the nation, and these boobs control what we drink.

Bringing It All Back Home

So there you have it. Blame it on wine technology, grapevine technology, global warming, corporate soullessness, critics, dumb ass retailers. The real root cause is the consumer appetites these elements seek to serve. Just as the paparazzi beleaguered Lady Di, we get high alcohol wines because we’ve communicated with cash that that’s what we want. As Walt Kelly liked to say, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

But hold on. Is this story really the calamity it’s portrayed to be? Most writers on this subject indict these changes in California wine as some kind of scandal, and heaven knows that our vineyards are always fertile soil for raking muck. Wine is the second sexiest of businesses, and its scandals sell lots of magazines. But the reasons behind rising alcohols, although laced with the usual juicy details, are almost entirely good news.

California is crowding the shelves with the more and better wine than ever before. After a bit of wandering in the wilderness, I believe we are emerging with an identity. There’s not a single wine on my ‘70’s Top Hits list that has any market today. They just weren’t as good as today’s offerings. We’ve gained incalculable knowledge since then on what to make and how to make it, finding our best position in a global marketplace. Dialing in proper maturity has been a key field of inquiry.

Are we there yet? Not on your life. But you can bet that every producer will keep dialing until their viable niche gets formulated. Personally I’m sick to death of the hot buttered toast bombs which, when first they burst on the scene, once swept me away. But I’ve made wine for thirty years since then, and it’s made me a little weird in my preferences. Today, I still support hundreds of winemakers in delivering the massive wines that pay the bills. And when I get the chance, I challenge them to try something more interesting.

It is possible to make wines which offer both richness and finesse, with profundity as well as the power to lift you off your feet. This isn’t news. Buy age-worthy wines, and age them. To the cellars, ye wine buffs! A month on the vine doesn’t substitute for a decade in the cave – what did you think? This is where the French have us. But we can make those wines too, and some of us will, because ultimately they will offer the best expression of our terroir.